Shelley posts on the irony of a summit on Social Software that has as attendies mostly “made up almost exclusively of white, educated, upper-middle or upper class, 30-50 year old males.”

Dave Rogers posts in her comments a “truth” I believe in computing – “I think history shows that technology has never changed _what_ people do, it only changes the _how_. Technology usually compresses processes in time, or expands them in space, often both at the same time. Most of the time we confuse the “how” with the “what,” and think something novel has happened.”

That last phrase though is a little off. It *is* novel when the time is shorted to accomplish a task, or distances are compressed, or messages further distributed. The “How” is important 🙂 But the essential truth he points to here I know to be very true.